My children are teenagers.
Teenagers are selfish.
They are the center of their world.
That’s the common wisdom anyway.
I wonder if it’s even true?
Maybe what’s more true is that young children are pretty open, loving and giving. They see the world as cooperative.
But then they wise up as teenagers.
They lose their childlike innocence—translate: they stop trusting people to do the right thing
And they see the world for what it really is.
A place where most everyone is out for number one.
In his books of poetry, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, William Blake records this.
For Blake, it’s a bitter but necessary transition.
Without the fall from innocence to experience, we would never be able to appreciate or even understand the innocence when it’s offered back up to us.
This week, two things brought this transition home to me.
- I was doing an author visit at an elementary school. My host asked that I focus on the places my writing had taken me. I found a piece of my early poetry, written when I was a teenager. I was astounded at my sheer selfishness. That’s not how I remember myself. I remember me being altruistic, kinder than most of the people around me. They were fakes.
- Our pastor, Tom Fuerst, asked us this week to examine our darkness. He said that without recognizing and naming our darkness, Easter Sunday with its promise of resurrection and new life is meaningless. We can’t be resurrected unless we understand what we are being resurrected from.
Maybe what happens from childhood to teenagerhood is that we start looking beyond ourselves. We look for people worse than us so we can feel better about ourselves.
Or maybe, we become so horrified by our own brokenness, our knowledge that we can never live up to our own expectations that we look around us to make sure we are not alone.
We aren’t.
Adulthood: when hyperawareness of what others do wrong stops.
Adulthood: accepting the responsibility of our own dark side. Adulthood: admitting it. Coming face to face with it. Owning it.
And then fixing it.
I think I’m stuck in perpetual teenagerhood.
I’m really good at picking out what everyone else is doing wrong. But what I’m doing wrong? Not so much.
I’m a mother. It’s essential that I guide my children in the way they should go. I help them through their weaknesses and encourage their strengths.
Focusing 100% on their inadequacies, and not at all on mine.
Hmm.
I am hyper focused on how they treat me. I operate under the guise that teaching them to treat me with respect is their pathway to happiness. It will help them earn a place in the world, people will like them, and they will like themselves.
Does that “lesson” turns into me focus rather than you and us focus?
I’m big on our need for community support. I wrote a whole dissertation on it.
But when it comes right down to it, do I practice true community? Or am I in it for me? Am I in it for what I can get out of others, how I can manipulate others to cushion my way in a tough world?
I know a few people who are truly good. I watch them and shake my head. If only I could be that good, I think to myself.
But, really? Do I want to be good? Or is it too much bother, too much work, too uncomfortable?
Being good is this: putting others before myself.
Jesus was a pretty wise guy. Love your neighbors as you love yourself.
When my child offends me with harsh words, I’m supposed to love him as I love myself. Rather than protecting my own feelings, I must try to figure out where the harsh words came from and love her out of them.
But wouldn’t that be sending my teenager the wrong message? Wimpy parenting? Trying to be a friend rather than his parent?
A very wise counselor at my children’s high school, Sharon Hofer, said it might be time for me to stop being the parent, and start being the partner.
What she meant was this. Rather than “punishing” him each time he broke a rule, as this was proving completely ineffective, I was to sit him down and talk with him about where he wants to go.
What does he see himself doing in two years? Five years? Ten years? How is the choice he has just made going to help him get where he wants to go?
The counselor reminded me that my job was no longer the parental punisher, but the parental guide.
I was to join forces with him and help him get where he wanted to go.
A partnership rather than a parental relationship.
In a partnership, one partner is not always right.
In a partnership, each is equally responsible for the success of the partnership.
In a partnership, expectations are clearly defined, as are common and individual goals.
In a partnership, there is honesty and investment, quarterly reports and evaluations.
For a partnership to work, each partner has to examine the darkness of his own soul.
Each partner has to lay aside his own self-serving motivation and instead serve the common good.
In a Nike world where “just do it” means do what you want when you want to do it, such a partnership could be tough.
But completely necessary.
No one knows my flaws better than my teenagers. They recite them in front of the mirror every morning as they examine their faces for new bumps.
If I truly want to walk in the light, I might need to join hands with my teenagers.
In this new partnership, we will prepare them for a successful future.
And I will face my dark side.